Читать книгу The Friendships of Women - William Rounseville Alger - Страница 19

CICERO and his daughter, Tullia, enjoyed an extraordinary friendship. From all the hints left us, it is to be gathered that Tullia was a woman of sweet and noble character. It is certain that she was most affectionately devoted to her father; and that she had accomplishments of knowledge and taste, qualifying her to be his companion and his delight in his age and grief. It is affecting to read how eagerly, on his recall from exile, she hurried to Brundusium to throw herself into his arms. She died at about thirty-two. He was thrown into a state of lamentable prostration. Turn where he would in his inconsolable sorrow, engage in whatever he might, tears constantly overtook him. His friends, Atticus, Csar, Brutus, Sulpicius, and others, wrote letters of sympathy to him. He retired to one of country-seats. Seeking the solace of solitude, he buried himself every morning in the thickest of the wood, and came not out till evening. In his former reverses, he says he could turn to one place for shelter and peace. "A daughter I had, in whose sweet conversation I could drop all my cares and troubles.

But now every thing is changed." "It is all over with me, Atticus: I feel it more than ever now that I have lost the only being who still bound me to life." He purposed to erect on a commanding site, as a monument to his dear Tullia, a splendid temple, which, as though dedicated to some god, should survive all the changes of ownership, and bear to distant futurity the memory of her worth, and of his sorrow for her. For a long time, he could think of nothing but the details of this plan, on which he intended to lavish the bulk of his fortune. He avoided society for almost a year, and never recovered from the wound which the loss of her gave his heart. Margaret Roper was the pride and darling of her father, Sir Thomas More, whom in return she venerated and loved with the whole depth of her heart. The beauty of their relation cannot be forgotten by those who have read the life of the great English martyr. It was by her brave duteousness that his mutilated body was buried in the chancel of Chelsea Church. His head, exposed upon a pole on London Bridge for fourteen days, was ordered to be thrown into the Thames; but Margaret rescued it, preserved it in a leaden box, and directed that, after her death, it should be placed with her in the grave.

One of the loveliest examples of this class of friendships is unveiled by William Wirt in the exquisite memoir he wrote of his daughter, Agnes, after her death at the early age of sixteen. The example is closely parallel to that of the famous and good John Evelyn, who, apostrophizing his daughter, Mary, in mournful memory, says, "Thy affection, duty, and love to me was that of a friend as well as of a child." So Wirt writes of his Agnes: "To me she was not only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside me." Not many fathers and daughters have been fonder or faster friends than Aaron and Theodosia Burr. The character and memory of Burr, in the popular imagination, have been blackened beyond the hope of bleaching. Of course, he was a man mixed of good and bad; and was not such an unmitigated devil as some would paint him. But his selfishness, sensuality, recklessness, and degradation give, in one respect, a peculiar interest and instructiveness to the enthusiastic friendship subsisting between him and his daughter. It is no disproof of the need of the great virtues to serve as the basis of a true and enduring friendship. It proves that a sincere love, even in an unclean and depraved soul, purges it, and adorns it with meritorious charms and real worth in that relation. However bad Burr may have been in other relations, to his daughter he was ever good, gentle, and wise, unwearied in his devotion, and clothed with many fascinations. Good persons may sometimes be ill-consorted and odious to each other, their intercourse full of jars and frictions. Bad persons may sometimes be so related as to show each other only their good qualities, and be happy friends, while all around are detesting them. In one of her letters to her father, Theodosia speaks of his wonderful fortitude, and goes on to say, "Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so elevated above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My vanity would be greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is in our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man." Burr, on the evening before his duel with Hamilton, wrote to his daughter a long letter, in which he said, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped, or even wished." Unhappily he slew his antagonist, and himself survived to carry a load of deadly and universal obloquy which would have crushed to the earth almost any other man.

Theodosia set sail from Charleston in a little vessel, which was never heard of again. It was supposed to have foundered off Cape Hatteras. The loss of his daughter, Burr said, "severed him from the human race." Certainly, from that time to the end of his prolonged and dishonored life, he never was wholly what he had been before. An inner spring had been broken, and the purest contents of his heart had escaped through the breach. Parton very fitly dedicates to the memory of Theodosia his highly readable and charitable life of her father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays to virtue, not even the affectation of a noble sentiment. But we may claim with justice, that the friendship with his daughter is one bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, among those whose union as father and daughter, was merged in a superior fellowship as friends, in a more intimate and delightful junction of ideas, sentiments, and labors. Their united lives, their mutual devotion, their shared counsels, pleasures, and tasks, form one of the finest of domestic pictures, a model of a Christian household. In the preface to the life of himself which he left for Maria to complete and publish, he says, "If my daughter should perceive any extenuation or any exaggeration, it would wound her feelings, she would be obliged to alter or omit, and her affection for me would be diminished: can the public have a better surety than this for the accuracy of these memoirs?" And Maria says, "Few, I believe, have ever enjoyed such happiness, or such advantages, as I have had in the instructions, society, and unbounded confidence and affection of such a father and such a friend. He was, in truth, ever since I could think or feel, the first object and motive of my mind." One of the most remarkable friendships of this sort was that of Madame de Staël and her father. Necker was a kind, good, and able man, who occupied a distinguished position and played a prominent part in his time. But the genius of his impassioned daughter transfigured him into a hero and a sage. Her attachment to him was, in personal relations, the dominant sentiment of her life. With distinct comprehension and glowing sympathy, she entered into his thoughts and fortunes. She was to him an invaluable source of strength, counsel, and consolation.

An instance, partly ludicrous, illustrates her tender solicitude for him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, "My God! had M. Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations, mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her father died, Madame de Staël was plunged into despairing grief, from which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy, which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an affecting tribute to his memory:

My heart hath said no name but thine

Shall be on this last page of mine.

Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the conditions of so blessed an experience.